There are several reasons why your lilac Bush may not be blooming as it should be and if you know how, you can actually make it bloom again. Fixing the problem shouldn't be as tough as it sounds and with a little bit of help and guides, you can definitely prepare your lilac bush for blooming in the next season, if not during the same season.
Some of the main reason are listed below and depending on the type of Lilac Bush, it may or may not work to solve the blooming problem:
1. Watering your lilac too often makes them have wet feet. They don't like too much water but just enough to survive and grow healthy. A good recommendation of the amount of water would be about an inch of water per week, during the hot dry summer weather. Some types of Lilac are known to survive an entire hot summer season, without any additional watering besides the natural rainfall, they get in their growing region areas.
2. Using improper fertilizing method can cause your Lilac to green up a lot but no bloom at all. Lilac bushes usually do not need fertilizer to bloom since it tend to absorb too much nitrogen from the fertilizer, which prevents blooming. Reducing the amount of fertilizer or using compost which has less nitrogen and more phosphorous will usually fix the blooming problem.
3. Lilac likes plenty of sunshine to make their blooms beautiful and healthy. Not enough sunshine will not only prevent blooming but also hampers the overall growth of the lilac bushes. So if there is anything that is blocking the sunlight from falling on the lilac bushes, remedy it by removing tree branches or anything preventing sunlight from reaching the leaves of the lilac bushes.
4. If you were unlucky and mother nature is playing bad on your Lilac bushes, a late cold freezes during the month of April and may, even so briefly is enough to cause the Lilac buds to break off from the tips. Once that happens, there will be guaranteed no blooming for the rest of the season. Although the late freeze may not kill or damage the Lilac bushes itself, it will only result in no blooming for the rest of the season.
5. Some people like to grow their Lilac plants in a pot container. While this may save space and prevents some insects from damaging the plants, the size of the pots may not be enough for its roots to spread out and grow strong roots. This problem can be solved, if you repot the Lilac bushes in a larger pot container and soon you will find your Lilac Bushes blooming when the time is right.
6. Strange as it may seem, Lilac Bushes actually needs cold winter weather to help promote blooms in the future warmer months. If you had some unusually warm winter days and the average winter temperature had been warmer compared to the past winter, then there are good chances that your Lilac bushes may not bloom during the warmer months.
7. If your Lilac bushes is over 5 years old, the number of blooms will be reduced greatly as compared to younger Lilac Bushes. Some may not even bloom though their leaves still looks healthy and this makes you wonder what you must be doing wrong. Not to worry, this is due to the age of the Lilac Bushes, and using the proper pruning techniques will help the Lilac Bushes to bloom in the next growing season.
8. Lilac Pest can cause damage to the bushes and may make the bushes weak. If this happens, then the bloom is almost certainly not going to happen. Getting rid of the Lilac pests will allow the Lilac bushes to heal itself before becoming healthy again. Some people use neem oil to treat the pest problem but sometimes this is not nearly enough and it calls for other methods of removing the Lilac Pests.